


336. broken backbones

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [158]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Gen, I realized I was going to type out that goddamn tag again and just started laughing to myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-05
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-09-06 15:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8759437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: “Don’t be nervous,” Helena says, but Sarah can barely hear her over the sound of the full moon. It’s terrible. It aches, an extra tooth in her gum, the sound of two knives sliding back and forth against each other, the wail of a violin note left echoing too long. Sarah wants to kill it – the moon – or maybe Helena, or maybe herself. She can’t tell.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: body horror]

“Don’t be nervous,” Helena says, but Sarah can barely hear her over the sound of the full moon. It’s terrible. It _aches_ , an extra tooth in her gum, the sound of two knives sliding back and forth against each other, the wail of a violin note left echoing too long. Sarah wants to kill it – the moon – or maybe Helena, or maybe herself. She can’t tell.

“I’m not nervous,” she snaps. The words crawl out of her mouth; they are made of fur and teeth.

“Yes you are,” Helena says, “I can smell it.”

“Fuck you.”

“Smells like rabbits and shivering and the color yellow.”

“ _Fuck_ you.”

Helena just blinks at her, placid and horribly unperturbed. She is sitting on the edge of the porch; if she leapt off the porch and ran ten steps she would be in the woods. Sarah is also on the edge, but she can’t stop pacing – back, forth, back, forth, going nowhere. The world is too close to breathe through. The sound of the moon. Helena’s words like knives in her ear. The smell of Helena – Sarah knows how long it’s been since she’s bathed, and what she had for breakfast, and she can feel every stitch of clothing on her skin, and the world is so bright and sharp and clear and she wants all of it to _leave_.

“You’re frightened,” Helena says, and Sarah leaps across the porch and grabs her sister’s throat and slams her up against the wall of the house. She’s full-on growling, now, in a way that rattles in her chest.

“Are you?” she says.

The answer is in Helena’s heartbeat, which is: slow. Steady. She doesn’t even blink. Sarah lets go of her throat and Helena drops to the ground, lands in an easy cross-legged position. She rubs her throat. “Ow,” she says mildly.

Sarah bites her lip – tastes blood – starts pacing again. Goddamnit. Fine. “How long,” she snaps. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t ask, but she is starting to get desperate.

“It could happen now,” Helena says. “It would hurt, but you could do it. If you are that…” The pause she leaves is shaped like the word _afraid_ , but instead she says: “excited.”

“How.”

Helena shrugs, the motion not in the least bit artful. “ _I_ don’t know,” she says. “It just happens. You change. You reach inside yourself to find yourself, and then you are you again, and you chase rabbits.” She stretches out her legs, reaches for her toes, fails to grasp them. She looks lazily, easily at home in her body. Sarah could kill her. Sarah can feel every single one of her teeth.

“I reach inside myself,” she says slowly, “to _find myself_.” Scorn drips from every one of her words. The _fuck you_ is implied, this time around.

“The moon-clock is ticking,” Helena says – just as lazy as before, but this time ringing with something more bitter. Sarah’s pissed her off. Finally. She tilts her head to the side. “Tick tick tick.”

Sarah leaps off the porch and lands on the ground and she wants to scream at the moon but not with her mouth, with every part of her body instead, _why are you letting this happen to me_ and _why aren’t you letting this happen to me_ and also an enormous and satisfying _fuck you_ and just when she thinks that she begins to change.

Her backbone cracks. She falls to the ground.

Every part of her body is terrible, wrong, not hers. Her bones are breaking. Her skin feels like it’s on fire – she wants to shed it more than she’s ever wanted anything, can’t imagine how she ever thought her desires were _real_ when this is the most real thing except she can’t hold that thought because her eyes are rolling back and her jaw is stretching out and she’s an apocalypse, she’s a cataclysm, she’s the end of the world.

It _hurts_.

She doesn’t know why she wasn’t expecting it to hurt.

Sarah doesn’t realize she’s been screaming until suddenly the world is silent and she feels the ache in her throat. She was screaming, and then she was howling, and now she is neither. Now she is: this. Four legs. Teeth.

From the porch Helena is grinning at her, entirely human.

(For now.)

“Hello, _sestra_ ,” she says. “Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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